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Published: January 1st 2006
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I'm in the U.K and it's 2006. Hooray! So, I know I said "Africa", and I know that "Africa" is different than "England", but these things happen, bear with me, people say one thing and mean another; it happens.
Fortunately for all concerned (i.e. the entire free world), I AM in fact heading to Africa, on Wednesday in fact, but I decided it was, one, cheaper, and two, more in keeping with the adventurous spirit of my plans, to get a one-way ticket to London and then fly to Africa from there. And so I got in touch with my good friend Russ Sharp, who lives in Bristol, about meeting me for New Year's in London, and he offered me a place to stay in Bristol, which is but a two-hour train ride west. And by Bristol I mean "Weston-super-mare", which is the town - township? region? - in which he lives, just outside of Bristol. The name, apparently, is Latin. "Super-mare" means "on the sea" - or so I deduced, seeing how "super" is "on" and mare reminds a good Canadian boy, fluent in grade school French, of "mer", which of course is "sea" en francais. "Weston", I should
add, translates roughly as "Weston".
So I'm here in West Country, hanging out with some lovely people, who include Russ, his girlfriend Kate, and her schoolfriend Tom, who was moved by the intensity and accuracy of my phony British accent to declare it "creepy". I said "that's not good" and he said "as a good thing" and I said "oh". I think it needs work. The others, the Westoners, can do passable Canadian accents, but not without the requisite dips into Brash American and Stoned Valley Girl, which are not, it should be said, mutually exclusive.
England costs a lot of money. I feel like a cheapskate. But I'll probably have spent upwards of $200 CAD in my less-than-a-week here, a good chunk of a
monthly budget for Africa, and that's without paying for accomodation. If your question is how can I afford this, the answer is, I can't. I am hoping for a anonymous (and beautiful) widow-type recluse to subsidize my exploits in exchange for artfully crafted drawings of stick figures.
New Year's was pretty wild. A prix fixe meal at a Greek restaurant in town (fixe-d at a high prix) followed by revelry in a
city street was the night. I've never seen New Year's excitement like this before in Canada. Many beer glasses were thrown, full, into the air. We covered our heads. The glasses were plastic. Still.
Touristy-wise, I've now been to Bath, a beautiful Georgian town bursting with history and life and other things perhaps better related in a picture, which contains upwards of 900 words apparently and can be found on this page. Today we walked around Cheddar Gorge, which is a gorge that is in some way related to cheese, cheese-making, and cheese miscillany. The countryside here is gorgeous, lots of villages with narrow streets and houses pushing their way up to the road; makes for crazy driving. I don't think I would do as well as Russ, who can navigate winding channels at high speeds and with the ease and chutzpah of a latter-day James Bond. The reference is in part compelled by the fact that all the cars here have European license plates, as do the cars in the Bond films. Maybe that shouldn't have been a surprising symmetry, considering that Bond is British and cars are cars.
I have started taking my malaria pills. I'm
told that they can give you "vivid dreams", of all natures, and that they also make some people a wee bit crazy, though I wonder whether these people may not be a wee bit crazy to begin with. Time will tell. In any case, I was still jet-laggged that night as well - the night I took the first pill - and as a result was seriously moved by the red light that filters through the red blinds in the rather colourful bedroom where I am sleeping at Russ's place. I did have some vivid dreams the first night, though the second night I did not. When I dreamt the dreams were more or less neutral, in that they were neither fantasies nor were they nightmares, though one was fairly disconcerting. Now, I don't want to have them every night, but I must admit that there's something pretty poetic and wonderful about having such convincing dreams. Many have waxed on and off about life being a dream, about waking life being an illusion, about there being some continuity between sleeping and waking. So basically what I'm trying to say is that anyone of poetic inclination should visit a malaria-endemic area.
Something iconic
We tried to subvert the "silly tourist shot" but that didn't really work. Either that or do LSD.
(p.s. I am not in fact an advocate for or user of LSD or any other mind-altering substances.)
(p.p.s. Most other.)
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Andrew
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Happy New Year!